The
United States and Britain make suitable partners. Abuse and torture at the
Hola camp in Kenya in the 1950s, Fort Morbut in Aden in the 1960s and the
Castlereagh interrogation centre for twenty years in Ireland remain potent
symbols of British war crimes. Colonialism and torture are inseparable. In
Iraq, US and British military are doing yet again what they have habitually
done in the past -- the colonial dirty work of governments determined to
protect private business interests above all else.

Plenty has also come to
light demonstrating the Bush regime's corporate welfare for businesses like
Bechtel, Halliburton and Carlyle in Iraq. The wholesale murder of civilians
and widespread torture of detainees there result directly from efforts to
quell resistance to control by foreign corporations of the country's
resources. It goes without saying these companies are determined to
outsource onto domestic taxpayers in the US and the UK the cost of the
military muscle necessary to achieve that control.

The same is true in the
developing war in the Andes where the war in Colombia seems to be spreading
inexorably into Ecuador and Venezuela. There, as in Iraq, Britain and Spain
have faithfully supported the US. But while in Iraq the war was originally
justified as part of the "war on terrorism", the Andean war is also dressed
up as part of the "war on drugs". It is worth noting the Andean war's
relationship with big business and dubious international finance.

Anguilla is a small island
in the West Indies which briefly hit the news in 1969 when it tried to
secede from the neighbouring British colony Nevis-St. Kitts. As with the
Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Nevis and
other Caribbean islands, Anguilla provides handy offshore banking and
financial services for tax-shy plutocrats, multinational corporations, Wall
Street and City of London financial houses and assorted arms and drugs
dealers – and very likely terrorists as well. In the first quarter of 2003
Anguilla was the largest foreign investor in Colombia at US$130m, followed
by the British Virgin Islands at US$82m. Pan that out over a year and it
amounts to over US$800m.

Tiny Anguilla (population
12,738 in 2003) sees little return on the investment, The main beneficiaries
of capital outflows from Colombia in the same period were the United States
(US$123m), Britain (US$74m), France (US$47m) and Holland (US$34m). Run that
out over the year and the US and its European co-investors are extracting
over US$1bn annually.

Here we are in the fiscal
twilight zone of offshore banking and financial services where the
transactions of corporate household names share computer printouts with the
deals of murderous drugs traffickers supposedly “wanted” by the US
government, like Colombian death squad leader Salvatore Mancuso. It is
difficult to understand what Anguilla's and the British Virgin Islands'
involvement in Colombia means. The banking secrecy laws of these offshore
centers make it impossible to discover who they are fronting for or what
larger financial processes are made to work by the cash flows geared through
them.

The
invisible hand and the regulator's blind eye

As economist Michael Hudson
has said "Prestigious accounting firms and law partnerships busy themselves
devising tax-avoidance ploys and creating a "veil of tiers" to provide a
cloak of invisibility for the wealth built up by embezzlers, tax evaders, a
few drug dealers, arms dealers and government intelligence agencies to use
for their covert operations." [2] When the New York
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer pinned convictions for dodgy offshore
practices on various prestigious Wall Street financial houses with fines of
a measly US$1.5bn (greater than the total annual budget of countries like
Honduras or Nicaragua), it was the merest blip compared to the amount of
cash handled by offshore financial centers.

Hudson argues cogently that
these offshore centers are an important source of funds to finance US
government debt. He dates this from the start of the Eurodollar markets by
the Bank of England and British finance houses at a time when the British
were looking for ways to support sterling in the 1960s and 1970s. He points
to the paradox that the US and British governments who have done most to
promote these offshore scams now suffer most from one of the contradictions
they engender. Companies use offshore vehicles to inflate profit statements
to shareholders and understate tax returns to government.

This Faustian dependence on
dubious offshore hot money may or may not be a factor in British Chancellor
Gordon Brown's resistance to joining the euro. But it seems clear that
Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan cherishes these offshore sources of
foreign exchange. They help him prop up the dollar so as to make feasible
the tax-cutting scams of Republican soul-mates like Grover Norquist and
arguments for unregulated "free trade". Forget the high minded neo-liberal
clap-trap about freedom. Corporations want deregulation throughout the
Americas as part of US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick's "free trade"
snake-oil program so they can shift money around to beat tax regimes even
faster than they do already.

More
death squad for your dollar

The natural extension of
this dodgy regulation-phobia has been to contract out military operations to
private mercenary businesses. The effects are evident in Iraq. In Colombia,
US based Dyncorp and the British based Defence Systems (a subsidiary of the
US company Armorguard) have been the most notorious of these mercenary
contractors. Subcontracting some military roles, mainly training, to such
companies affords governments deniability in the case of abuses by allowing
the mercenaries to range free from normal statutory controls that would
apply to government armed forces.

These companies have been
implicated in providing training to the paramilitary death-squads that
repress legitimate civil dissent in Colombia under the pretext of "fighting
terrorism". The US Occidental Petroleum and Spain's Repsol have been urged
by Amnesty International to improve controls on their security arrangements
in Colombia's Arauca department. British controlled BP-Amoco's use of
contractors implicated in training local paramilitaries confirms that all
these companies operate policies that tend to regard paramilitary crimes
against the local population as part of the price of doing business in
Colombia. [3]

Britain is reported to be
the second largest supplier of military aid to Colombia after the US,
although its convoluted arms export licensing system allows the UK
government to minimize its own direct role in the arms trade. Spain recently
sold Colombia over 30 heavy battle tanks. Renowned for their ability in the
"war on drugs" to intercept high speed coastal launches and low flying light
aircraft? Or for their astonishing capability in the "war on terrorism" to
trek on foot through mountains and forests hunting guerrillas? No.

Most likely, they are for
use against Venezuela. That's if Colin Powell and the Pentagon can stop
fighting long enough to remember their main job - providing imperial muscle
for giant multinational corporations. As September 11th 2001 showed
conclusively, defending the people of the United States is not a priority
for either the Pentagon or the State Department.

Drugs and
terror - through the looking glass (yawn...) one more time

The public relations nature
of the “war on drugs” is readily seen from the double standards applied that
are so familiar from the fictional “war on terror”. Just as Miami Cuban
assassins like Orlando Bosch or Haitian mass murderers Jean Tatun and Guy
Philippe are protected by the US as being OK “our” terrorists, so drugs
kingpins like Salvatore Mancuso are protected as being OK “our” drugs
traffickers. A brief look at the treatment meted out to other drugs
traffickers confirms this. [4]

In April 1988, the United
States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Honduran security services
illegally snatched Honduran narcotics dealer Ramon Matta Ballesteros from
the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa. They abducted him to the United States
where he was interrogated under torture (they burned him repeatedly with a
high voltage stun gun) before being tried and convicted. He remains in
prison. His abduction followed that of Mexican Humberto Alvarez Machain
accused of complicity, like Matta Ballesteros in the 1985 murder of a DEA
agent.

Alvarez Machain fought his
case on the illegality of the abduction. He won. Ballesteros did not. Among
many similar cases involving the DEA, that of Uruguayan Francisco Toscanino
stands out for the horrific torture applied under DEA supervision in Brazil.
While the courts condemned the use of torture in the Toscanino case, DEA
torture of Matta Ballesteros was passed over. This kind of routine torture
is another link with the bogus “war on terrorism” .

The anti-drugs and
anti-terrorist activities of the United States and its allies exist in
symbiosis. Both are failing because both are fake. If the US is prepared to
abduct individuals like Matta Ballesteros, Alvarez Machain and Francisco
Toscanoni, they could just as easily snatch the drugs cartel leaders who
control the Colombian paramilitaries. They do not because those individuals
are key allies who deploy cut-price, twice-removed terror against armed
opposition to the United States main ally in the Andes, the Colombian
government.

As a group the Colombian
drugs cartels and their paramilitary cohorts channel much-prized foreign
exchange through offshore banking centers into US and European capital
markets. That is one reason why President Uribe, with US backing, is
currently trying to push through legislation to legalize the paramilitaries.
Another reason is that legalizing the paramilitaries will make it easier for
the US and the corrupt Venezuelan opposition to mobilize them against
democratically elected President Hugo Chavez.

Wrapping
up blood and guts on the way to Caracas

Trying to gather up into a
manageable skein all the threads of deceit from the record of the crooked
Bush regime and Tony Blair's cabinet-full of war criminals is a bit like
gathering up the viscera of a gutted, badly slaughtered animal. Blood and
shit are everywhere. The dirt and slime stick.

Among the sickly,
glistening reality, the fawning pooches in Downing Street try to disown the
mass murder and systematic torture in Iraq along with their plutocrat
butcher-handlers in the White House. These governments are never going to
regulate the offshore financial centers that channel money from arms and
drugs and illicit tax-evasion scams into US and British capital markets. And
they'll support drugs dealing paramilitaries along with corporate mercenary
contractors as long as they need to until they can mobilize some more final
solution to their energy needs.

The pending
corporate-friendly “free trade” agreements with the Andean countries are a
necessary part of that solution. But it will take a US provoked war in
Venezuela to make it really final. The same perverted logic that led to the
catastrophe in Iraq is at work in the Andes.